Page 22 of Katabasis
This made sense, in theory. Souls that had passed bureaucratic clearance should not get to wander willy-nilly back into the Fields of Asphodel. It would throw the accounting all out of joint. You couldn’t just decide you didn’t like being punished and nope back out into Limbo. Alice should have anticipated this, but still it frightened her, the fact that their paths were erasing themselves behind them. It made the stakes permanent. Either they succeeded, or they died.
Yet even as the wall disappeared, gray tendrils of mist poured out of the ground and swirled inquisitively around them—darting around their forms as if sentient, as if listening to their thoughts and feelings to get a sense of who they were and what they had come for. Then the tendrils swirled back into the fold, where they coalesced and spiraled, shuddering as if to a magician’s drumbeat before his great reveal, before dispersing to the sides like curtains swinging open. Here, said Hell. Have a look at this.
“Is that...?” Peter tilted his head up, following a bell tower into the orange sky. “That’s impossible.”
“But Hell adapts to us,” Alice murmured. Penhaligon’s scattered appendix on Hell and temporality had not been clear to her until now. “Hell is a mirror.”
The Eight Courts of Hell reflected the world of the living. Nearly all the ancient mythologies converged on this principle. So many ancient rituals were conducted as if in Hell, all the patterns of life continued on. Mourners put coins under the tongues of their dead so as to pay their passage; they buried them with favorite pets and treasures. The recently deceased soul was disoriented by his tearing from life. Hell had to resemble the familiar, otherwise he could never move on.
This theory, though not universally accepted, did explain why Dante’s Hell involved all the poets and artists and politicians he was personally familiar with over his lifetime. And why paintings of the Buddhist hells displayed all the ritual trappings of Chinese palaces: gardens and pools and harems of concubines. And why both Greek and Mesopotamian visions of the afterlife involved neat, orderly systems of justices, gatekeepers, and accountants armed with records and scales, processing lines of the dead the same way passport offices process citizens. At the end of the day, human beings preferred the predictable order of their known bureaucracies. One’s sins took on meaning in the context of their moral universe, comprised of their loved ones, their idols, their rivals, their victims. Dante saw philosophers and politicians. Aeneas saw ghosts of warriors past. One was hurt most by what one knew. If Alice had to guess, Professor Grimes’s moral universe—the full accounting of things that delighted him, the things that brought him pain, and the people by whom he could do wrong—did not stretch beyond the Cambridge station.
So perhaps they should have expected, then, for Hell to take on a most familiar landscape: Gothic towers, courtyard walls, and winding between them, a single paved path—just wide enough for pedestrians and cyclists, not wide enough for cars. You always knew, stepping into such places, what they were for. You knew precisely where you were from the uniformity of design; the same shades of brick and stone across buildings. You knew from the lack of wide streets and shop signs; from the quiet absence of children. You knew from the arched gates that marked the boundary. Fairy gates, signaling departure. The mundane world ended here. These were not places of leisure or business. These were places to be still, to think, and to step out of time.
“Christ,” said Peter. “Hell is a campus.”
On Reincarnation
The one thing on which all Tartarologists can agree is that Hell prepares souls for reincarnation.
The Eight Courts of Hell are not arenas of eternal punishment. For one thing, this would be wildly unjust. No sins, no matter how heinous, deserve an eternity of punishment. That would be disproportionate; the math does not check out. For another, the universe needs balance. As Socrates put it, “If the living were to be born from the other world, and the living were dying all the time, what would there be to prevent everything being used up in death?” When it comes to death, the Christians are right about the immortality of the soul but wrong about everything else. Here the Pythagoreans, the Platonists, the Buddhists and Daoists, the Manichaeans, the Jains and Sikhs and Hindus, have a better grasp of things. Living and dying are two sides of the same coin. It makes more sense to conceptualize souls as continuously flowing from one world to another than to think everything that ever lived is forever accruing in an underworld tomb.
In the 1960s, the philosopher Michael Huemer argued for the plausibility of reincarnation on probabilistic grounds that most scholars have now come to accept. According to Huemer, we have reason to believe that time stretches infinitely into the past and into the future. If time is infinite, the probability that our singular lifetime happens at this very moment, at this very speck on the line, vanishes toward zero. So either time is finite, or we live more lives than one. Huemer argues it is at least plausible that the past is not finite, so we have decent evidence to believe in eternal recurrence. Theologists and religious studies folks do not like this argument for the same reasons they don’t like Pascal’s Wager, which is that it seems to mathematically cheat to conclusions that religions have taken thousands of years to articulate.
Magicians love it.
Theories of reincarnation overlap nicely with theories of eternal recurrence, an idea championed by both Friedrich Nietzsche and the Pythagoreans. Broadly understood, eternal recurrence argues that the events of the universe are fated—or doomed—to repeat themselves over and over again, for there is a finite amount of energy and material in an infinite universe, over an infinite amount of time, and the combinations with which they can interact are finite as well. The eternal hourglass of existence, so to speak, turns over time and time again. We are reborn to flow with the sand.
Unfortunately, scholarly consensus only goes this far. Tartarologists disagree wildly over how reincarnation works. How long must one wait before rebirth? Is rebirth familial—does your dead grandmother become your daughter? Do karmic goodness and badness accrue over time, so that the virtuous live better and better lives? Can one ever escape the cycle of reincarnation, as the Buddhists hope? Can human souls be reborn into animal bodies? For that matter, do animals have souls at all? We know memories are washed clean between lives, for there is no record of anyone credibly remembering a past life. We know very little else for certain.
Most baffling of all is the question of punishment. What purpose does it serve? Is it rehabilitative—must we only suffer until we’ve learned our lessons? Is it retributive—must we balance the karmic scales, lose an eye for an eye, and suffer as much as the suffering we wrought? How many hours in pits of boiling water balance out a murder? Is punishment a form of contrapasso, as Dante describes, wherein punishments arise from the nature of the sin itself and represent wrongdoing’s poetic opposite? Does punishment entail the universalization of broken maxims, as Kant theorized? Is Hell one great metaphysical manifestation of the Golden Rule?
The only thing we know for certain is that souls in the Underworld eventually travel, in some shape or form, to the domain of Lord Yama—that is, Hades, Anubis, King of the Dead, Lord of the Underworld, Judge of Life and Death, or however else one wishes to perceive him. As with many concepts in magick, Lord Yama is defined more by absence of proof than proof itself. He is a concept that stands in for what we do not know. He could be a rational agent, fair and just, a philosopher-king of the chthonic realm. He could be a demon, volatile and capricious. He could be imperceivable divinity, which in these circles is code for “no one’s published on this.”
For all our theories and stories and myths, Lord Yama’s design remains an utter mystery. No one knows for certain what precisely happens in those courts, or why; least of all the Shades within them. If it is a test, no one knows how to pass. If it is mere torture, no one knows how long it will go on for. One cannot anticipate, cheat, or find a shortcut through redemption. We cross the Lethe and reincarnate whenever Hell deems us ready. It happens when it happens. Until then, we get what’s coming.
Chapter Six
Alice felt a little thrill passing under that gate.
She had always delighted in starting a new term at a new institution—elementary, middle, high school, college, and at last Cambridge. She liked learning her way around the buildings, getting library access, nestling into tucked-away study nooks, finding her favorite shortcuts between her department and the dormitories. She liked becoming a person that befit the institution. With each new matriculation you had the chance to reinvent yourself, to deserve your place there. And now Alice felt, though she knew this was dangerous, an instinctive want to fit into this place.
If Hell was just another institution, then it couldn’t be so bad. It wasn’t even a city university, which would have involved horrifying things like shopping malls and subway stations. No brutalist eyesores here. Hell was ancient in the comforting way, an Old World campus, neoclassical pales over American reds. There were no trees or grassy lawns, for nothing grew down here, but that was all right; the silt was arranged in its own elegant manner. All told, this current Hell was rather pleasant. And she would have thought she was right back above, save for the quiet.
It was the absence of undergraduates, she decided. It was undergraduates who made a university come alive, with their clumsy hustle, their self-importance and newfound freedom. Undergraduates were fresh blood. They asked questions. They brought ideas, and when they couldn’t come up with ideas they at least brought problems. Without their chatter, campus was frightfully still. But even this failed to frighten Alice as it should have. It had been so loud in her mind for so long. She liked the quiet.
“You might be right,” said Peter.
“What?”
“It might be progressive,” he conceded. “It might be there’s only one way forward.”
Alice saw what he was seeing. Unlike other campuses, there was no crisscrossing of roads and shortcuts. There was only the one path, and when Alice tried to trace where it led, she found that most of the campus blurred in her vision, undeniably present, but pushed to the background. All she could see in detail was a round building directly before them, several stories tall, its sides ringed with columns, and its top curving into a dome. There were no windows, only plinths, and atop each stood robed statues of scholarly affect.
You cannot go back and forth, Hell informed them. You cannot jump this queue. You can only proceed in order. The First Court, and then the others.
“The map’s decided, then,” said Alice. “We’ll go one by one.”
So they strode up to the building and pulled open the heavy doors of the First Court, Superbia, the Court of Pride.
